Tintin’s life and adventures filled the historic terrace rooms of Somerset House, London with sketches, drawings, watercolours and original artwork from the Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, supplemented with models and graphics. The creation of Georges Prosper Remi, known as Hergé, the young enthusiastic reporter Tintin is one of the most popular and enduring cartoon characters of the 20th century, along with Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thomson and Thompson and Snowy the dog who at times is the most intelligent of all of them.
As Tintin prepares to pack up his suitcase and move back to Belgium, Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk has arrived with “The Museum of Innocence”.
How many people have boxes of dispirit objects from memorable moments in their lives, places they have visited or lived in, or of dead relatives or former lovers? Pamuk brings his 2008 book “The Museum of Innocence” to life through 13 museum cabinets full of objects which tell their own stories of 1970’s Istanbul and the lives of the wealthy businessman Keman and his love Fusun, linking to references in the book to museums, hoarding and collecting, alongside different cultural attitudes in Turkey in the 1970’s and Kamul’s aim to keep Fusun trapped within his own museum.
The styles of the exhibitions reflect the different nature of the work of the two authors. Visitors to Hergé–Tintin exhibition will be entertained and leave with more knowledge than when they arrived, whereas the “Museum of Innocence” is more subtle and there appears to be an assumption that the visitor will have read the book and know the story, which the exhibition can then bring to life through the cabinets, videos, drawings and text, but this is a missed opportunity to engage with visitors who may never have read Pamuk’s book – all it would have taken is more explanation at the start.
